Dental Implants

Dental Implants can help patients improve the look and health of their mouths.

Dental implants are comprised of an artificial tooth that sits atop a titanium anchor placed in the jaw. This method of implant dentistry allows for maximum stability and a completely natural feel. Dr. Forman fixes the new tooth or bridge onto the dental implant. This allows patients to regain the original form and function of their smile, bite, and speech patterns. Dental implants can be used to anchor a full or partial set of dentures as well. This further leads to speaking and chewing ability. And, with Dr. Forman’s advanced implant dentistry techniques, many patients can have their teeth replaced in one day!

Wiki Excerpt on Dental Implants

The Mayan civilization has been shown to have used the earliest known examples of endosseous implants (implants embedded into bone), This datesg back over 1,350 years before Per-Ingvar Brånemark started working with titanium. While excavating Mayan burial sites in Honduras in 1931, archaeologists found a fragment of mandible of Mayan origin. This was dated from about 600 AD. This mandible, which is considered to be that of a woman in her 20’s, had three tooth-shaped pieces of shell. And, they were placed into the sockets of three missing lower incisor teeth. For forty years the archaeological world considered that these shells were placed after death in a manner also observed in the ancient Egyptians. However, in 1970 a Brazilian dental academic, Professor Amadeo Bobbio studied the mandibular specimen and took a series of radiographs. He noted compact bone formation around two of the implants. This led him to conclude that the implants were placed during life and were actually one of the first known forms of dental implants.

In the 1950s research was being conducted at Cambridge University in England to study blood flow in vivo. These workers devised a method of constructing a chamber of titanium. That was then embedded into the soft tissue of the ears of rabbits. In 1952 the Swedish orthopaedic surgeon, P I Brånemark, was interested in studying bone healing and regeneration. And adopted the Cambridge designed ‘rabbit ear chamber’ for use in the rabbit femur. Following several months of study he attempted to retrieve these expensive chambers from the rabbits. He found that he was unable to remove them. Per Brånemark observed that bone had grown into such close proximity with the titanium that it effectively adhered to the metal. Brånemark carried out many further studies into this phenomenon. He used both animal and human subjects, which all confirmed this unique property of titanium.

Meanwhile an Italian medical doctor called Stefano Melchiade Tramonte, understood that titanium could be used for dental restorations. He designed a titanium screw to support his own dental prosthesis (dental implants). Tramonte started to use it on many patients in his clinic in 1959. The good results of his clinical studies on humans were published in 1966.

Brånemark had originally considered that the first work should centre on knee and hip surgery. He later decided that the mouth was more accessible for continued clinical observations. And the high rate of edentulism in the general population offered more subjects for widespread study. He termed the clinically observed adherence of bone with titanium as ‘osseointegration’. In 1965 Brånemark, became the Professor of Anatomy at Gothenburg University in Sweden. And he placed his first titanium dental implant into a human volunteer, a Swede named Gösta Larsson.

Contemporaneous independent research in the United States by Stevens and Alexander led to a 1969 US patent filing for titanium dental implants.

Over the next fourteen years Brånemark published many studies on the use of titanium in dental implants. However, in 1978 he entered into a commercial partnership with the Swedish defense company, Bofors AB. That partnership developed and marketed his dental implants. With Bofors (later to become Nobel Industries) as the parent company, Nobelpharma AB (later to be renamed Nobel Biocare) was founded in 1981 to focus on dental implants. To the present day over 7 million Brånemark System dental implants have now been placed. And hundreds of other companies produce dental implants. The majority of dental implants currently available are shaped like small screws, with either tapered or parallel sides. They can be placed at the same time as a tooth is removed by engaging with the bone of the socket wall. And sometimes also with the bone beyond the tip of the socket. Current evidence suggests that dental implants placed straight into an extraction socket have comparable success rates to those placed into healed bone. The success rate and radiographic results of immediate restorations of dental implants placed in fresh extraction sockets have been shown to be comparable to those obtained with delayed loading in carefully selected cases.